Green Mars(220)

Maya let them talk for an hour before she said anything but “I know.” And she did know! It almost made her weep to look at them, to see how shocked they were by injustice and cruelty. Then she went over the points of the Dorsa Brevia Declaration one by one, describing how each had been argued out, what it meant, and what its implementation in the real world would feel like in their lives. They knew more about this than she did, and these parts of the discussion got them more fired up than any complaints about Earth— less anxious, and more enthusiastic. And in trying to envision a future based on the declaration she often got them laughing: ludicrous scenarios of collective harmony, everyone at peace and happy— they knew the squabbling cramped reality of their shared apartments, and so it really was funny. The light in the eyes of laughing young Martians— even she, who never laughed, felt a small smile rearranging the unseen map of wrinkles that was her face.

And so she would end the meeting, feeling that it was work well done. What use was utopia without joy, after all? What was the point of all their striving if it did not include the laughter of the young? This was what Frank had never understood, at least not in his latter years. And so she would abandon Spencer’s security procedures, and lead the people in the meetings out of their rooms and down to the dry waterfronts, or into parks or cafés, to have a walk or a drink or a late meal, feeling that she had found one of the keys to revolution, a key that Frank had never known existed, but only suspected when looking at John.

“Of course,” Michel said when she returned to Odessa, and tried to tell him about it. “But Frank was not a believer in revolution anyway. He was a diplomat, a cynic, a counterrevolutionary. Joy was not in his nature. It was all damage control to him.”

But Michel was often contrary with her these days. He had learned to explode rather than soothe if she showed signs she needed a fight, and she appreciated that so much that she found she didn’t need to fight nearly so often. “Come on,” she objected at this characterization of Frank, and shoved Michel onto their bed and ravished him, just for the fun of it, just to drag him into the realm of joy and make him admit it. She knew perfectly well that he felt it was his duty to pull her always back toward the midline of her mood oscillations, and she could see his point, no one more so, and appreciated the anchoring he tried to provide; but sometimes, soaring up at the top of the curve, she saw no reason not to enjoy it a little, those brief moments of no-g flight, something like a spiritual status orgasmus. . . . And so she would pull him up by the cock to that level, and make him smile for an hour or two. Then it was possible for them to walk together downstairs and out the gate, and down through the park, over to her café in a mood of relaxation and peace, there to sit with their backs to the bar, and listen to the flamenco guitarist or the old tango band, playing its piazzollas. Talking casually about the work around the basin. Or not talking at all.



• • •

One evening in the late summer of M-year 49, they walked down with Spencer to the café and sat through the long twilight, watching dark copper clouds that sat glowing over the distant ice, under the purple sky. The prevailing westerlies drove air masses up over the Hellespontus, so that dramatic fronts of cloud over the ice were part of their daily life, but some clouds were special— metallic lobed solid objects, like mineral statues which could never just waft away on a wind. Spitting lightning from their black bottoms onto the ice below.

And then as they watched these particular statues, there was a low rumble, and the ground trembled slightly underfoot, and the silverware chattered across the table. They grabbed their glasses and stood, along with everyone else in the café— and in the shocked silence Maya saw they were all automatically looking to the south, out toward the ice. People were pouring out of the park onto the corniche, and then standing against the tent wall in silence, looking outward. There in the fading indigo of sunset, under the copper clouds, it was just possible to see movement, a winking black and white at the edge of the white-and-black mass. Moving toward them across the plain. “Water,” someone at the next table said.

Everyone moved as if in a tractor beam, glasses in hand, all other thoughts gone as they came to the tent coping at the edge of the waterfront and stood together against the chest-high wall, squinting into the shadows on the plain: black on black, with a salting of white spots, tumbling this way and that. For a second Maya recalled again the Marineris flood, and she shuddered, forced the memory back down like chyme in her esophagus, choking slightly on the acidity, doing her best to kill that part of her mind. It was the Hellas Sea coming toward her— her sea, her idea, now inundating the slope of the basin. A million plants were dying, as Sax had taught her to remember. The Low Point melt pod had been getting bigger and bigger, connecting up to other pods of liquid water, melting the rotten ice between and around them, warmed by the long summer and the bacteria and the surges of steam from explosions set in the surrounding ice. One of the northern ice walls must have broken, and now the flood was blackening the plain south of Odessa. The nearest edge was no more than fifteen kilometers away. Now most of what they could see of the basin was a salt-and-pepper jumble, the predominant pepper in the foreground shifting even as they watched to more and more salt— the land lightening at the same time that the sky was darkening, which as always gave things an unnatural aspect. Frost steam swirled up from the water, glowing with what looked to be reflected light from Odessa itself.